How author names should look in Zotero
dstillman
Zotero Team
This discussion was created from comments split from: Citations putting in authors' initials/names.
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should it be inserted as:
Bloggs, J.
Bloggs, J,
Bloggs, Joe.
etc......
Please show the correct format to get an in-text citation to look like (Bloggs, 2024) not (J Bloggs 2024)
You can always test it works in a fresh document. If you see extra letters you might just have citations with the same name and the citation style disambiguation kicks in. See https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation
Bloggs, J. 2015
Bloggs, J, 2018
Bloggs, Joe 2021
Bloggs, Joseph 2022
Zotero may treat these as different authors and use the first name to disambiguate them. So Bloggs 2015, 2022 appears as (J Bloggs 2015; Joseph Bloggs 2022). To avoid this, try to use the same given names for all instances of the same person, regardless of how it shows up in a publication. This is not a bug but a feature. Imagine having J Bloggs being Jennifer Bloggs, while Joe and Joseph Bloggs are both Joseph Bloggs.
J Bloggs
Bloggs J
J.Bloggs
Bloggs. J
J, Bloggs
Bloggs, J
J, Bloggs.
Bloggs, J.
Explicitly show me the order and what punctuation is required, please.
In two fields -- you'd see the comma when the name is displayed, but wouldn't enter it
So what exactly should it look like in Zotero?
10.1038/s41597-019-0031-8 for example
Do all references need to have the double box format selected?
This is particularly important when using a Chicago style. See my comment in another recent thread:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/115879/how-to-fix-inconsistent-author-names-in-zotero#latest
It was also required in earlier APA style guides but no longer.
[edit: There are authors with quite common names. What I find creepy is when there are different unrelated authors with exactly the same full name who are contemporaneously writing about the same subject but who are in different professional disciplines.]
It can be very tedious to find author names that need editing and to do the edits. Through the years there have been comments for changes to the program or for plug-ins. But even with a utility to facilitate identifying and editing author names there will still need to be some human decision-making needed. An author named Jennifer Alice Bloggs who is listed in the article metadata shouldn't be confused with Joe who was mentioned above -- even though the journal provided her name as Bloggs, J.A.
This is a well-recognized problem for keeping names straight in databases (not just Zotero). Author authority services (ORCID, ResearcherID, VAIF) have been introduced but as adamsmith mentioned in the thread I linked to above (and I have grumbled about in other threads) these haven't solved the problem. There are a few online databases that try to expand author names so that all names are listed as the most complete version, or like Scopus and assign an alphanumeric identifier that will keep all authored items together while listing the author name as published.
This could become an essay about identifying names in need of disambiguation but this isn't the place for it. Name disambiguation is essential but tedious to perform in your database.
*edit: the 'one box' name field shouldn't be used for individuals with more than one name but should be for agency or institution names (CERN, RAND Corporation, World Bank, International Labor Organization). It can be used for mononymous named people (Plato, Socrates, and maybe Sting?Modonna?).